The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  I try to picture Greg O’Brien. Like Brian’s brother, Frank, he was older enough that he seemed like an adult to me when I was in high school. Tall. Greg hadn’t been as good-looking as the twins, whereas Frank Lombardi had been the kind of good-looking that distracted people. Girls he’d never met knew who he was, talked about how he was home from college and that they’d seen him downtown.

  “They’d been out at the bars and they came in and we were all hanging out. I guess Jessica and Chris went home but Erin was still there and she was wasted. She was having fun but I could tell she was pretty out of her mind.”

  He’s doing something with his hands, pulling at his fingers as though he’s trying to pull them off. He doesn’t meet my eyes, just keeps talking.

  “She and Greg O’Brien were kind of making out and then Frank was like, trying to make out with her, too. It was…” He’s crying now and I feel tears on my own face. “We were so drunk. I didn’t even know what he and Greg were doing until they were already in the den with her. They…”

  He has his head in his hands. He doesn’t say anything.

  “They raped her,” I whisper. I need to say the word. I need him to hear me say the word.

  “It wasn’t. I didn’t realize. Devin and I watched. We … I wanted to stop them, but you know Frank. He … You can’t talk to him. I was so drunk, Mags, I was just like, paralyzed.”

  I stare at him. “Derek, too? Three of them?”

  It takes him a minute. “Yeah, I guess. And when they were done, they put her in a spare bedroom—she was crying, but then she fell asleep—and I took her home the next morning in Frank’s car. He made me. I didn’t even have my license.”

  “What did you say to her?” I’m standing now, moving toward him. I’m not sure when I stood up and I can feel my hands itching at my sides. If I had my gun, it’d be up against his head. I know that. I’m glad I don’t have it.

  “Nothing. Just, you know. ‘Oh, we were all so drunk. You were so drunk.’ I told her she’d been flirting with them and I didn’t know what happened, but things had gotten crazy.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was just really quiet, looking out the car window.”

  Her face pressed against the window of the train.

  “You fucking asshole,” I say. “You told her not to say anything. You were warning her against saying anything about what happened.”

  “They didn’t mean to hurt her,” he says.

  I’m still standing. Now I want my gun. I want it so bad I can taste it.

  I lock eyes with him. We’re almost there.

  “Okay, Brian. So what happened in Dublin?”

  49

  THURSDAY, JUNE 9

  2016

  He comes all the way down the stairs and, without looking at me, he walks a tight loop around the basement, his hands behind him. I can’t see what he’s holding, but I start paying attention.

  “Mags,” he says. His voice is different now, matter-of-fact. Everything before was a confession. This is different. “It doesn’t matter anymore, exactly what happened. It was an accident and it … It can’t bring her back.”

  I want to scream at him, curse him, tell him he owes me the truth. But I’m a cop, even now. And I know that won’t get me what I want. Which is the whole story.

  “I know, Brian. I know. It must have been awful. I assume it was an accident.”

  He looks up gratefully and sits down again on the bottom step.

  “We . . Chris and Jess and I and Lisa, we were traveling that whole summer. You know that, right? We used our college graduation money and we were backpacking, Eurailing mostly. We started off in Dublin, staying with Erin. Then I went to London, to stay with this girl I knew from college. She was some kind of fucking genius. She was like in medical school or something but she was also like a total hash dealer and she was gone a lot and I stayed at her place for a bit.”

  I wait.

  “Dublin,” he says finally. “At first it was okay. We’d ended up being pretty good friends, me and Erin, over the years. I thought she’d forgotten about it. It was like we had a secret and that was okay. But when we got to Dublin, I could tell that she was pissed at me. She was just sort of cold. One night we were out at a pub and I’d had a lot of Guinness or whatever and I asked her why she was mad.

  “Chris and Jess were off making out in the bathroom or something. It was just us. She said, ‘You know why I’m mad. You know.’ I had to think about it and I said, ‘Oh that thing that happened at the O’Briens’? We never talked about that.’”

  Floorboards creak upstairs. He stops talking and we both wait.

  No more footsteps. Lilly.

  “What did she say?” I ask him.

  “She said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I mean, Brian. When your brother, Frank, and Greg and fucking Derek O’Brien raped me and you scared me out of telling anyone and it fucking ruined my life.’

  “I felt like she’d punched me in the stomach, just like ripped me open.” He looks up at me with wide, wounded eyes. I’m so close to lashing out at him, hitting him, scratching his face, getting out my gun, it scares me, but I manage to stay calm and wait for him to go on.

  “I said that it was a long time ago and they’d been drunk, she’d been drunk. That if I were them I would have thought she was up for it. She wouldn’t let it go, though. She said she’d decided she was going to tell everyone, that it wasn’t right they should get away with it. That Father Anthony had known. She was going on about God in the mountains and some rock and she was acting crazy, saying that Frank was getting married and his fiancée deserved to know he was a fucking monster, all this kind of shit. Then she stormed out of the pub.”

  “That was the night she disappeared and you guys had to wake up her roommates,” I say. I’m starting to fit it all on the time line.

  “Yeah. We … I left the next day and went back to London. I didn’t know what to do, though. Frank had just gotten the job at Goldman, he was getting married. My parents were so happy. She was going to freaking blow everything up. I didn’t know if there was a statute of limitations or whatever, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t up yet.”

  “What happened once you got back to London?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I was really worried about it. I called her and tried to convince her to let it go. But she … she was just … calm, in a weird way.”

  I remember Emer’s email, Daisy coming home as Erin was getting off the phone. Some people just don’t know when to stop pushing.

  “So you went back to Dublin.”

  “Yeah. I took the ferry over. There were so many people, all these long lines. They didn’t even stamp my passport, just looked at it. I thought about that later, what if they had? It sucked. I got so sick on the way over, just like puking the whole time. I got there and I … I wasn’t sure what to do. I took the bus to the city, you know, I was … I was sick still and so tired. I remembered where she lived.”

  I force myself to say, “You must have been really confused about what to do.”

  “Yeah, it was like, if she was going to tell people, it would … Frank couldn’t have that happen. And it was my fault. If I’d just talked to her. I thought I could talk to her.” He looks at the boxes, the piles of his stuff, Erin’s stuff, my stuff. “She was my friend.”

  “What about Father Anthony?”

  He looks at me. Something flickers in his eyes. I think maybe I’ve overplayed my hand, but he waits a minute and his shoulders slump and he says, “Yeah. There was that. I told him in confession one time. Then I regretted it, but I couldn’t take it back. When he died, I was sort of relieved, but then something Erin said that night she took off … I wondered if she had a statement or something.” He looks up at me, his eyes stricken.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I called her house from a pay phone I found on the way. She answered and when she heard it was me, I could tell she hadn’t changed her mind. She was sort of calm, like she’d
already decided. That was what freaked me out. Erin was always such a lunatic. Well, you know. But that calmness. It was like she was a different person.”

  I wait. He rubs a hand over his face, keeps the other one behind him.

  “I thought it would freak her out if I told her that I was already in Dublin, so I . . I didn’t know what to do. I looked up and there was a bus getting in at eleven thirty and I just said, ‘I’m getting into the bus station tomorrow, the seventeenth, and can you meet me and we can talk and figure this out, Erin. Write down the bus time. Come on. We’ve been friends for a long time.’ He’s looking right at me now, talking directly to me. The basement feels cold, as though someone just opened a window.

  The piece of paper. I picture Erin jotting it down, tearing it off, sticking it in her pocket. She wasn’t writing it down so she could meet him—she was writing it down so she could be sure not to be in Dublin when he arrived.

  Oh, Erin.

  “But she said she wouldn’t meet me. She said she was writing me a letter and I should just wait for it.”

  “What did you do?” I know, most of it at least, but I need him to tell me.

  “I went to her house. I remembered where it was. I was almost there when I saw her come out with her backpack. She was wearing her leather jacket. I hung back and I followed her. She went to an apartment somewhere but she didn’t stay long. When she came out, she walked for a bit and then she stopped and got her fleece out of her backpack. She almost saw me then. I had to jump behind a wall.”

  We hear the floorboards creaking again and he stops and gets up to go to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Cat,” he says finally.

  “Keep going,” I say. He almost looks relieved. I know that look. Once suspects have told you enough of their story that they know you’ve got them, they start to find relief in the telling. They start to enjoy the release.

  “She walked up to that big park, near Grafton Street.”

  “St. Stephen’s Green?” I say.

  “Yeah, there were all these buses on the far side. She walked up to one of them and I saw her talking to the driver. Then I saw her get off and head toward another one. I was worried she was going to get on and I’d lose her, so I ran up and I said, ‘Erin!’ and she turned around and she looked shocked to see me. Like, really shocked. I told her I just wanted to talk, about what we’d talked about before, about Frank, and how he hadn’t meant anything by what he did. She just looked at me and she said, ‘Leave me alone, Brian,’ and I heard her ask the bus driver if he could drop her in Glenmalure, after he took everyone to Glendalough. I guess he said yes, because she got on and the doors closed.”

  He hesitates. What he’s about to say holds some kind of power for him. He’s gearing up for it. “I came so close to going back to London, Mags. I did. I went to a pub and had a drink and I figured I’d go back and call Frank and warn him. I drank too much that night. I kept meeting people and finally I fell asleep in some park somewhere and when I woke up the sky was, it was, it was just getting light. And I thought, for some reason, I went back to the buses and there was one leaving and I said, ‘Can you drop me in Glenmalure?’ and the driver said sure, he was going to stop there anyway because someone had arranged for it ahead of time. So I got on.”

  I know why he’s stuttering now, struggling with it. This is the hinge. It’s where the whole thing could have turned out differently.

  “We pulled up in front of this hotel and, I couldn’t believe it, I saw her. She was walking down the road. I don’t think she saw me. I got off the bus and I saw her walking up the road and I just, I followed her. Into the woods.”

  He takes a deep breath. He’s staring at the ground. He barely knows I’m in the room. I almost tell him to stop, but I know I need to hear him say it. Without the next part I’ve got nothing.

  “She realized you’d followed her all the way down there,” I say quietly. “She was scared.”

  “Yeah, she freaked out. When she saw me, she accused me of following her to try to convince her not to tell and she started running away and I was chasing her and I grabbed her by the leg and I just … She wouldn’t stop screaming and I needed to make her be quiet. That was all I wanted, to quiet her down so we could talk and I could explain to her about Frank and about how she couldn’t say anything but maybe he could apologize, maybe I could get him to apologize.” He’s crying hard now, tears running down his cheeks.

  “Her fleece, her, her jacket came up over her face. We were on the ground and I was … I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just pressed it against her, her mouth, so she’d be quiet, but then she…” He takes a huge, shuddering breath. “Then she was quiet.”

  We’re both silent for a long time. I don’t want to keep going but I need what’s next. “Where was the shovel?” I prompt him.

  “I’d seen it along the trail. I think that was a lot later. I waited … all day, I guess. It all kind of blurs together. At one point, I heard people talking and I lay down next to her in the, like, the bushes, hiding. When it was almost dark, I went back and got the shovel and I took her far away from the trail, really far away, like a mile or more, way down into some trees. She wasn’t heavy. I dug a … you know. I was trying to roll her in it when I heard something and I looked up to find this … girl. She was staring at me, watching the whole thing. There was something wrong with her, Mags. She was crazy. She was singing to herself, in another language, like German or something, weird stuff. I don’t know. But she’d seen me. There was no way to explain what she’d seen. I took the shovel and I … You know. It wasn’t very hard. It was … fast. And I waited until it was light again and I put her far away, up toward the trail more. I thought maybe … I don’t know, that it would make it less likely they’d be found. Time was … it was weird, Mags. I must have been there for a whole night. It made sense at the time. I didn’t mean it, Mags, it was an awful accident. If she’d just talked to me, if the other girl hadn’t acted so weird.”

  He’s finished. I need one more thing, though.

  “Did the necklace and the scarf come off when you were on the ground?” I ask him.

  “No. I … I found the scarf later. And her ID. I put it in the, the second grave. I didn’t see the necklace. Later, when you told me you found it, I realized.”

  “She dropped them for me,” I tell him. “She dropped them as a message to me.”

  “What…?” He’s done with his story. He’s drained now. In just a second he’ll realize what he’s done. He’ll get angry. Scared. I have to be ready.

  “The scarf. I gave it to her. It was a message. And the ID. She was trying to tell me to pay attention. Father Anthony gave her the necklace. He knew about what happened. I think she told him the night we found her at that house. She told him. And he was willing to testify. He was willing to report it. He wrote a statement, acknowledging what happened. He gave it to her. She hid it in the box with the necklace. She was telling me to look there, but I was … I didn’t realize. When I found the necklace. She was telling me to go look in the box. His letter told me everything. It told me about Frank.”

  Brian looks up. In the low light, his eyes are dark and empty.

  Footsteps.

  I keep eye contact with him. Very slowly, he moves his hand out from behind his leg and that’s when I see it; my Glock. He’s gotten it from the gun safe.

  “Dad?” Lilly’s standing there on the stairs in her pajamas.

  “Hi, Lil,” I call up, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “I just got home.”

  “Mom!” She starts to run down the stairs, but then she sees my face. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Lil. Please go upstairs, okay? To your room. I’ll be right there.”

  She stares at me for a minute, trying to figure it out. She knows something’s wrong. “Dad? Is everyone okay? Is Uncle Danny…?”

  Before I can stop him, he’s up the stairs. He gasps, then makes a low moaning sound. He hugs Lilly, then takes her face in
his hands. He says, “Lil, I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You’re the best, best thing, Lil. The only good thing that I ever did. Never forget that.” I hear the Glock clatter to the floor and then he’s gone. I can hear his feet pounding on the kitchen floor.

  “Call 911!” I scream at Lilly as I race after him. “Tell them I need at least two units and an ambulance.”

  * * *

  I know where he’s going.

  I sprint the length of Bay Street, taking a shortcut through a backyard down toward the water. The pavilion looks sinister, looming in the tiny bit of moonlight. I sprint through, past the swing set and the lifeguard station and stand there, searching the beach in front of me, but I can’t see him until I do, a bobbing head out past the floats. I kick off my shoes and wade into the water. It’s still cold and I can feel numbness climb up my legs.

  But I strike out, swimming straight for him, keeping an eye on the beach so I don’t get too far over. I can see him ahead of me. I’m closing in.

  “Brian,” I call out. “Come back to the beach!” But he keeps swimming, straight out, toward Connecticut. He’s a good swimmer and I can see his arms breaking the water, hear the little splashes. I’m a good swimmer, too, though, and I’m closing the distance.

  And then he goes under for a minute. I don’t see him at all. His head reappears, but only the top of it. We’re pretty far out.

  “Brian!” And then I feel him there, next to me, the weight of him.

  He thought he could keep going, thought he could just slowly sink under the water. But now his survival instinct is kicking in and he’s panicking as his body tires. He’s grabbing for me, trying to use me as a float and I remember my lifeguard training. I’ve got to get him to calm down, to let me tow him back to the beach.

  “Brian, let me help you,” I shout at him, but he goes under again.

  I dive, my hands out in front of me, feeling for him under the dark water, but he’s not there.